But she was the love of my life.”
“That is why you could not bring yourself to agree to marry Maximilian,” I murmured. “Because your heart lay elsewhere.”
“How did you know?”
“I found the sketch—tucked under the endpaper of Alice’s ledger. The sketch was illuminating and clearly drawn by someone who loved you intimately.”
She closed her eyes, briefly, and an expression of pain flickered across her face. When she opened her eyes again, she had recovered herself.
“Well, I will not be the first monarch to put aside my youthful love and marry for reasons of state,” she said, turning a heavily jeweled betrothal ring around on her finger.
“Maximilian?” I was aghast, but Gisela was matter-of-fact.
“The wedding is to be in the spring. I will advance him the money he requires to pay his gambling debts and he will spend the next few months proving himself to me. Given how grateful he is for my forgiveness and his own embarrassment at his actions, he will be entirely biddable as a consort.”
“But after all he has done—”
She turned to me, and there was a worldliness in her gaze that spoke to long experience of the failures and foibles of men. “Miss Speedwell, you have known Maximilian a few short days. I have known him all of his life. He is a good man. He just does not know it yet. Responsibility will be the making of him, I will see to it.”
“He put a threat into a box of chocolates for a fright,” I argued. “And he arranged for a bomb to be thrown at you.”
“A silly note and a firecracker,” she replied with a curl of her lip. “He has told me all about his debts, and I can assure you his travels will never again take him to Deauville. I will pay what is owed, and that will be an end to the matter.”
“I can only say that you are the best judge of the duke’s character,” I said, my voice unenthusiastic to my own ears. She smiled.
“Do not forget, Miss Speedwell, he kept my secret when I asked him to. When I had need of him, real need, he was as stalwart a champion as anyone could wish. He pretended to have a tendresse for Alice so that she could stay in the Alpenwald without anyone growing suspicious. And I turned to him again when I decided to steal the badge and the rope from here,” she said softly, her eyes lighting with amusement. “He proved a rather better housebreaker than I might have expected. And then when I went to Pompeia, he told no one where I had gone.”
I blinked at her. “He swore he did not know,” I began.
“Oh, he knew. And he told no one, just as I asked of him. For a long while he even pretended to be courting Alice in order to throw off any possible suspicion that she came to the Alpenwald to see me. He has been a good friend, and he will make me a good husband,” she said firmly.
“Will you be happy with such a choice?”
She regarded me in obvious surprise. “Happy? I am a princess. It is not my place to be happy. It is my place to govern. And I will do so as Alice and I discussed. I will bring my country into the new century with new ideas. There will be resistance to our progress, and I am prepared for that,” she added, her gaze steely. “My own personal happiness matters nothing when weighed against the well-being of my people.”
“Then I wish you every success, Your Serene Highness,” I told her.
I moved to curtsy, but she put out her hand to shake mine instead. “Thank you, Veronica Speedwell.”
CHAPTER
30
At the princess’s invitation, Stoker and I traveled to the Alpenwald as guests of the royal family and were accorded far more prominence than we might have expected. I amused myself en route by reading the Daily Harbinger, which devoted several issues to the upcoming nuptials complete with sketches of the princess’s trousseau. There were no articles written by J. J. Butterworth, a notable omission, and one that told me she had not yet succeeded in breaking the story she had followed into Windsor Castle. Whatever game was afoot, I had no doubt she would, in the end, prove an able hunter. I was pleased to find a small article near the back of the newspaper that made mention of an expedition embarking upon the Canadian Rockies—an expedition that included